


res ipsa (just alarms)

by extraordinarilyprettyteeth



Series: the nineties organized crime au absolutely no one asked for [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: AU, Drug Mentions, F/M, Medical mentions, The backstory, danzo is a pos but we knew that already, don't we all love dissecting the dynamics of unhealthy relationships?, friends to lovers to 'get out of my apartment', i know i sure do, i'm also not a doctor but researched to the best of my ability, the nineties organized crime au absolutely no one asked for but i wrote anyway, this was incredibly cathartic to write and i loved every second of it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-23 20:04:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20208721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extraordinarilyprettyteeth/pseuds/extraordinarilyprettyteeth
Summary: Rin just wants to finish up her residency, honestly. That's it. Settle into some routine, quiet sort of existence; maybe get a dog, or a hobby, or some modicum of a social life. Do some yoga and learn mindfulness, if she's feeling particularly wild that day.It's just really, really unfortunate that things haven't ever worked out like that.





	1. august 29

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is my pet project, and I hope you enjoy it. it predates prima by a couple years, and I like to think it'll eventually Explain some things. 
> 
> I actually had someone edit this one, so if it's Bad I have literally no excuses.

**August 29**

She's a fourth year medical student the first time she sees him, and it's through a never-ending haze of screaming kids and the utilities piling up and the tuition bills that are starting to roll in like the fog over the east banks, and it feels oddly like the time some kid bigger than her punched her in the gut in the eighth grade.

The assessment rooms are falsities, tiny cubicles partitioned off of the interlocking corridors that make up the emergency room. Rin can hear the elderly man in 5B from  _ here _ , and he's griping loudly enough for the residents in the surgical wing to overhear his every thought. She sighs, squares her shoulders, tries to draw the burning in her feet up through her entire body, because at least that would keep her awake.

Rin shoulders through the papery curtain into 6A—male, mid-twenties, not discernibly ill but presenting with a supposed infection of some kind, and it all blurs into a momentary assessment, diagnosis, in the door and right back out again like a bad draft in a poorly insulated house. “How are we doing?” She really, really hopes that she sounds more awake than she feels, because the triage nurse's notes are swimming in front of her eyes, and she still has four hours to go until six.

“I mean, I could be better.” He has the audacity to grin at her, as if this is some kind of social mixer, as if she  _ doesn't  _ have the power to have him in one of those dignity-stripping paper gowns at any given moment. “I'm alive, right?”

“What brings you in here?” Rin clicks her pen in a manner that might come off as aggressive, to some. “Bleeding? Seizing?” She sets down the clipboard with a resigned exhale, snaps on a pair of powdery rubber gloves with practiced motions. She  _ dreams _ about putting on gloves and drowning in hand sanitizer, in between the night terrors about paying for medical school and also making her utilities. “What's going on?”

He has an attitude she doesn't like all that much, and it's the attitude that usually comes with one of her patients informing her of what they've seen on the latest hospital soap this week, and how they're  _ certain _ she's breaking protocol or misdiagnosing, or the inevitable  _ how much do you really know, can I see the physician attending instead _ , and she's maybe five to fifteen minutes from losing her mind entirely. God, honestly. One more Grey’s Anatomy rehash, and she might just  _ die _ \--

“You know, the usual.” He looks her over, assessing, and it's different from the usual patient with a medical fetish, fortunately; it feels more like he's trying to subtly determine whether or not she's a threat, which is strangely refreshing after one too many old men trying to grab her ass. “Stuffy nose, sore throat.” He pauses. “The human condition.”

“Is that so.” Rin doesn't let herself smile, although it's significantly more difficult than it usually is. “Care to elaborate? I'm a little liable if you die in here.” Her eyes dart up for a moment to meet his, and she immediately occupies herself with fitting a blood pressure cuff to his arm. It's easy, something routine to fall back on.

He smiles again. It's strangely arresting, and Rin hates herself a little for being taken with a marginally pretty face. Not even pretty—more like interesting. His nose has definitely been broken at least once, but it's not all too noticeable. His attitude, though, makes her want to break it again. “I think I might have an infection.”

“All right, then.” Rin slides the stethoscope underneath the cuff, inflates it and waits. “Let's take a look.” She logs it all—a little high, but otherwise within the norm—and rips a disposable thermometer strip off its plastic scaffolding. When she hands it to him, his palm is cold, clammy. “Lie down, please.” Upon closer examination, he's a little pale, and there's a barely noticeable sheen of sweat on his forehead; she ticks off her imaginary checklist and slates a tox screen as next up if she can't find anything else.

The tiny cubicle is quiet aside from the crinkling of the paper on the exam table and the griping of the old man in 5B and the distant white noise of the waiting room—children and the elderly and the eerily silent, all waiting in plastic folding chairs. Rin clears her throat and wonders what time it is now, prays to god that she isn't getting sick  _ again _ .

“You said infection.” She adjusts his head slightly, and her hands go to the lymph nodes in his neck, prodding gently. “What makes you think so?”

“I, uh, had some issues with a couple scrapes I got last week.” His eyes are closed now, and she's always thought it's funny how most people's first instinct is to lie back, shut their eyes, let their pupils rove beneath closed lids. “They're a little swollen.”

Rin glances over at the chart she left open on the black plastic chair, searches out the box where his name is. It's just Tobi, no surname, and god, if that doesn’t raise a red flag or two. Or five. But whatever, right? “Okay,” she says slowly, and it's hard not to jump to conclusions with things like this. “Okay, where at?” 

She wonders, absently, why his chart wasn't flagged, why they let him in without any identification, wonders if he even has insurance coverage, but then—but then that isn't her job, her job is just to treat everyone and anyone who walks, hobbles, or drags themselves into her exam room. Cubicle, really.

Tobi—if that's even his real name, and it likely isn't—blinks up at her, and there's definitely some struggle to focus under the fluorescent lighting. “Left side.”

“Stay still, if you can.” Rin takes a half-step back, assesses his breathing, alertness, everything she  _ hadn't _ considered earlier, because when someone complains of 'flu-like symptoms', it's a far cry from 'potentially infected laceration'. “How old is the wound, exactly?” She keeps her tone and touch businesslike, tugs his shirt up to beneath his arms, tries to keep her reaction nonexistent.

“Six days.” His eyes rove the room, flitting from ceiling panel to light fixture to the bright neon of the exit sign. “I think.”

Rin sucks in a breath before she can stop herself, because  _ fuck.  _ It definitely looks to be about six days old, that's for certain, and she'd hate to see a cut if this is what he calls a scrape. “This is a  _ stab wound _ .”

“I mean, kind of.” He tenses when she presses down on the swollen tissue at the outside of the wound, which has been stitched—badly, that is, but stitched just the same.

“Typically people mention that upon admission.” Rin reminds herself that she is here to provide clinical care, not life advice, but come  _ on. _ “You could have gone into  _ sepsis _ .” The stitches aren't  _ terrible, _ but they clearly haven't been professionally done, and the laceration has the trademark discoloration and nominal amounts of the clear discharge that indicate a mid-stage infection.

He tries to grin, although it's more of a pained grimace. There's a piece of hair stuck to his forehead, curling into a comma over his temple. “I've been lucky so far.” He's very good at suppressing his movements under her touch, but the tiny flinches are impossible to ignore, not when she can feel every single breath under one splayed hand.

“You and I have different definitions of lucky, then,” Rin says under her breath, because in all honesty, this is a fucking mess. She isn't entirely sure what he does for a living, but his pain tolerance is something else.

“Do we?” His mouth twists into a facsimile of a smile. “I mean—”

“All of these are going to have to come out. We're going to clean it, re-suture, and then set you up with antibiotics and a follow-up.” Rin has absolutely zero qualms about interrupting, because it is two in the morning and this  _ idiot _ has been walking around with a stab wound bordering septic territory for the better part of the last three to six days, and she really, really hopes the secondhand anxiousness for others will lessen a little the longer she works the floor. “Sound good?”

“No objections here.” The way he studies her is unnerving, as if he's memorizing the details of her face.

For all of ten seconds she's silent, debating whether or not to crack open the last issue that's standing in the corner like a forlorn child, and somewhere in the back of her mind it occurs to her that wounds like this don't just  _ happen _ , and for god's sake, if he's some type of— “Do you have identification?” she asks, and her tone is deliberately casual as she goes to move his shirt further up, and it's right around then that everything goes to hell.

“No, you—” His face changes in an instant, flickers from carefully curated ease to a contorted kind of fear, and the way he coils back in a rumple of paper and a little too much panic for a run of the mill patient is more than enough for her.

Rin can see what he's trying to do, swats his hand away before he can grab her wrist. “Listen,” she says, and this time she allows the edge to set into her tone, wrap bits of steel fiber into her words. “You are already here. You are under my care, and I'm not about to—”

He stares at her for a long, long moment, and the tattoo over his heart contorts every time his heart beats—one sixty, one eighty, one eighty-five, tiny blips across a screen, over and over and over and— “I don't have identification,” he says, and his voice is low, something quiet and insidious in this excuse for an exam room. “I don't.”

The mark is identification enough, and they both know it.

“Give me a name.”

“Tobi.”

Rin narrows her eyes, lets go of his wrist. It's an offering, a crapshoot; she's giving an inch and hoping to god she won’t regret it.. “A real name.”

The Uchiha—because that's what he  _ is _ , that's what he  _ has _ to be, because he's wearing that ink and is simultaneously alive to talk about it—swallows, and she can see every muscle in his throat contract, release, can see him breathe. He opens his mouth as if to speak, but ends up saying nothing, as if the words are caught in a glottal stop and second thoughts.

“I'm not going to withhold treatment.” Rin's words are stiff, and part of her is perpetually hurt when patients assume that of her. “Just give me a first name.”

He sucks in a breath, holds it, holds it, lets it out again. “Obito.”

“Are you even officially  _ here _ , Obito?” His name feels odd in her mouth. Rin doesn't think about it— _ can't _ let herself think about it—and begins to cut away the initial sutures instead. “Because I feel like if I looked up your intake number I wouldn't find anything.”

“Nope.” Obito's limbs are rigid, locked into place as if he's afraid to move around too much. “A friend got me in.” One of the threads catches a little, and he breathes out through his nose, sharp.

“All right, then.” Rin is incredibly impressed with the calm she's able to maintain, despite the wilder this gets by the second. She thinks of it as improv, at this point—just agree, keep her hands moving, keep on doing her job. She's dealt with weirder, that's for sure. “What was the weapon?” She glances over at his face, and he's once again eyeing her, as if trying to read something in her features that isn't all there.

“Butterfly knife,” he says, and the words are short, choppy, diced into bite-sized syllables. “It was clean.”

Rin grabs the alcohol swabs off the little rolling stand that follows her from room to room and begins to clean out the laceration. It's routine, a set of motions she could do in her sleep. “And you didn't seek medical attention, initially?” It's an iffy question, and extends beyond clinical appraisal; Rin is acutely aware of that, but there's something in her that wants to know.

“Nah.” Obito's voice is strained. “My cousin did those night of.”

“Ah.” Rin isn't entirely sure what to say to this, and is afraid that if she opens her mouth at all she's just going to ask him what the fuck he was thinking. She’s somewhat impressed with his cousin’s ability to suture, but that’s neither here nor there. They’re definitely not great, but she’s seen worse. “I see.”

They lapse into an uncomfortable silence, punctuated only by the rasp of his breathing. If anything, she's impressed with his pain tolerance, and it makes something in her gut catch when she considers how it might have gotten to such a high threshold. She finishes the sutures with methodical precision, and all the noise seems to melt into a blur of sounds, white noise, something easily ignored. Rin has always been very good at putting people back together.

“You're going to need antibiotics, too,” Rin says, and she keeps her voice low. There's background noise fading through, the perpetual beeps and breaths of machines, people running, people yelling, people coding on tables—she reminds herself that this is just another part of that. “It doesn't look as if the infection spread much, but better to be safe.”

“I have amoxicillin at home from the last time I had strep.”

“Obito.” Rin fixes him with a look, and smooths gauze adhesive over the wound. “I'm going to give you a script.” She drops the dirtied instruments into the sharps bin and strips her gloves off, tosses them away.

“It'll be fine.” He rolls into a sitting position without too much difficulty, pulling his shirt back down; there are glimpses of one or two other patches of scar tissue, an irregular geometry against the rest of his abdomen.

“Do you want to end up back here in another week?” Rin starts tossing her equipment back onto her cart, and manages a peek at the clock out in the hallway. Three and a half hours to go, she tells herself, and something in her sinks at the thought.

“Depends.” Obito grins at her again, and for a moment it's almost endearing. “Are you gonna be here?”

Rin raises an eyebrow and jerks her head at the door. “Go out the back. Past the nurse's station, there's an auxiliary entrance. It goes out to the employee lot.”

Obito grabs his jacket off the chair, and the way he looks at her, sizes her up—it's much more unnerving when he isn't incapacitated, when he isn’t at her mercy. “Aren't you going to get in trouble for that?” It’s almost a knowing 

“Not if I tell them you did a runner.” She lifts her chin a little, because fuck, she can take care of herself, she can watch her  _ own _ back, and it isn't as if she hasn't done it before, for people with no insurance or no money. The sentiment is nice enough, though. “Go, though. Now.”

It seems, for a moment, that he's going to say something else, and standing there with his mouth-half open in her exam room, he isn't  _ entirely  _ unattractive. “Thanks,” he says, and then he's by the door, peering at the lanyard around her neck from a safe vantage point. “Thanks, Rin.”

“I took an oath,” she says, but it's hard to fight off what wants to turn into a smile.

Obito grins at her, half out the door. “Can I get your number?”

“I have other patients, you know.” She doesn't, not yet, but he doesn't need to know that. “I don't do house calls, either.”

“I meant more as, like, an 'I take you out for coffee' situation.”

“Next time, maybe.” 

He rests one arm on the pale yellow of the wall, tilts his head to the side just slightly. “Okay, an ‘I  _ bring _ you coffee situation’, then.”

Rin crosses her arms over her chest, wonders how good he is at hiding pain, whether or not he's going to make it home—because stitches or not, that type of wound fucking  _ hurts _ .

“Think about it.”


	2. september 23-october 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> worldbuilding, folks. 
> 
> read: 'I wrote this three months ago and I forget how it fits in the progression, but it Does'.

**September 23**

A day passes, then five days, then a week. It's two weeks before Rin stops holding her breath whenever anyone from administration passes her while she's on rotation, and almost three before she stops scanning the waiting room with something like worry.

It's a month or so later, at the tail end of September. It's a Friday, and Rin is flying back and forth between exam rooms, making laps around what feels like the entirety of the emergency department's second tier triage. She's only four hours in, and it's closing in on ten o'clock when Shizune grabs her sleeve on her latest run past the nurse's station.

“Hey.”

“Hi, yeah, what's up?” She is, regrettably, a little out of breath; Rin considers the idea of doing actual cardio outside of work for all of ten seconds before scrapping the concept altogether, because ninety percent of the time she just wants to go home and collapse on her bed when her shifts are over. “Everything okay?”

“Check on 4D, if you could?” Shizune passes off yet another clipboard to her, with an apologetic smile. “Maybe mid twenties, limited mobility, orthostatic but otherwise stable.”

Rin nods. “Anything else?” She rifles through the chart with practiced motions.

“One of your friends was in here earlier.” Shizune slaps a sticky note onto Rin's sleeve and smirks at her. “Remind whoever he is that he can't just walk onto a ward .”

Rin fights the overwhelming urge to roll her eyes. “Got it.” No, it's definitely relief she feels when she glances down at the obnoxious yellow sticky note, relief and maybe something else. She almost wants to laugh, because that asshole drew a fucking smiley face on it, but bursting into an exam room giddy over a post-it note a potential criminal left her isn't exactly professional behavior. “I'll let them know,” she calls over her shoulder, and takes off for 4D.

“He left you coffee, too,” Shizune calls after her. “Come back for it later!”

Rin rips the sticky note off her arm and allows herself five seconds to smile, and then she's edging past the curtain into 4D. She glances down at her chart, and then at the three people in the room. “Nagato?”

“Yeah.” He's on the smaller side, and it doesn't look like it's natural to his build, either. “Yeah, that's me.” He's unusually pale, and when he lowers his hand back into his lap, she can see the tiny tremors.

There's a girl with bright blue hair sitting in the plastic folding chair, completely stone-faced; there's a peek of dark roots close to her scalp, and when she presses her mouth into a thin line, there's the glint of a piercing through her lower lip. She's assessing Rin, memorizing her name badge, her appearance, everything about her, and it's intimidating. It feels like being taken apart piece by piece and put back together again.

“Okay, then, what's going on?” Rin slips easily into businesslike efficiency; she slips a blood pressure cuff around one arm, checks pupil dilation, searches out any sign of substance use. “Fever? For how long?”

“He's  _ been _ sick,” the other boy says, and he's tall, practically bouncing in place in the corner. “He's  _ been _ sick, and he's not gonna tell you anything about it.” His hands don't stay still; they flit from place to place like small birds, and his eyes dart back and forth between Nagato and the blue-haired girl, as if daring them to challenge him.

“I've been sick for a couple days, that's it,” Nagato says slowly, and it's worrying when his pupils don't dilate properly. His eyes are glassy, cast with exhaustion and some sort of absence she can't quite determine.

“It's been  _ months _ .”

“Yahiko.” The blue-haired girl's voice is sharp, and it's the first time she's spoken at all. “Calm down.” Her posture, though, belies her own nervousness; she sits as if she's on trial, scans the room and looks at Rin as if to challenge.

Rin's gaze darts between the three of them. “Okay,” she says to Nagato, and her voice is her patient voice, calm and unflappable. She yanks the stethoscope off her neck and presses it to his chest. “Breathe in, to three, and then out again.” The fact that the blue-haired girl and Yahiko are apparently conversing entirely through eye contact and aborted gestures unnerves her, but she'll be damned if she lets anyone see that.

“He can breathe just fine.”

_ “Yahiko.”  _ This time it's Nagato who speaks, and when he moves a hand to push the hair away from his face his hand shakes again, although no one would know it from his demeanor.

Rin glances between the three of them, and it's a complicated mess of minute expressions, implied meaning that she can't hope to divine. “Is there anything else I should know?” The hand tremors are worth noting, in her opinion; untreated nerve damage is inconvenient at best. “Any prior medical issues?”

The silence is uncomfortable, a long drag of sullen stares and minutiae, half-formed movement impossible to intercept, to interpret. The girl in the chair exhales, long and slow, and it's as if the deep breaths Rin had wanted from one is coming from the other. “He was in an accident, as a kid.”

Nagato tenses; Rin can feel a shoulder blade jut into her hand, from where she's frozen with the stethoscope to his back. “Konan.”

Konan blinks, and she looks to Yahiko and then looks to Rin, and the way her mouth twists and the way she avoids looking at Nagato is telling, to say the least. “Young, maybe fifteen. Fourteen or fifteen.”

“It was five years after,” Yahiko cuts in, and the same war is present in his face as it is in Konan's. He does not specify after  _ what,  _ exactly, because that would be far too helpful. “He'd already had a limp, so everything else just—just made it worse.” There it is again, the restless hands, the perpetual movement; it's as if he gives off enough nervous energy for the three of them, because Nagato and Konan have hardly moved at all.

Rin is more than happy  _ not _ to ask for the moment, and honestly, she's seconds away from asking the other two to wait outside. Berating herself internally for making that kind of mistake,  _ again _ , she turns back to Nagato. “What happened recently?” In her peripheral, she can see Konan tense. “Confidentiality exists, just as a reminder,” she adds, sharp.

Nagato tosses his head back a little, and the way he scrutinizes her is the same way that a deer watches from the side of the highway, the same way that mounds of hard snow watch from the sheltering overhangs on the L train platforms. “An altercation.”

“What's your range of motion like?” Rin clicks a pen, rifles through the pages of his chart. It's sparse, with no more than a handful of notes from over a course of years—routine physician's visits, mostly, up until the age of nine.

Nagato shrugs. “Okay.”

Yahiko makes a noise, somewhere between choking on air and disbelief.

“Tremors.” Konan is impassive, or at least her voice is. Her eyes keep darting back to Nagato, and there are flickers of something else there that Rin can't quite discern. “They've gotten worse over the last month or two.”

The three of them look at one another, and they're a unit, a set of magician's rings she can't pry apart. “I need to refer you out. I can see if a specialist is here.”

“No insurance.” Konan eyes her speculatively, and her gaze seems to catch on the small details, on things she finds suspicious.

Yahiko snorts. “Do they accept internal organs as payment?”

Rin is fairly certain that the look on Konan's face is exactly the same as the one she herself is trying to suppress. “I'm sure you can work something out with Tsunade.” She forces herself back into a professional mindset, because it is so, so easy to lose herself in other people—in their problems, in their lives, in the oddly unique way each individual breathes in and out. “She's very good. Amazing surgical results.”

“Surgery?” Nagato sounds more curious than anything else, although there's an odd set to his jaw and that same distant cast to his eyes, and maybe it isn't fever so much as his desire to be anywhere else.

“I mean, not necessarily.” Rin swallows, wants to redo this assessment entirely. “Less invasive options are—” She clears her throat, stands up a little straighter, thinks she needs to sleep a good deal more in order to function properly, does  _ not _ think about this mystery coffee that she has apparently been left. “I can get the attending for you, to do a more thorough—”

Konan stands in what seems like a millionth of a second, and she's between Rin and Nagato with a suddenness that would make one think she'd always been standing there. “We're leaving,” she says, and she is cold metal, an iced-over gate. “We're leaving.”

“Konan, you—”

“Yahiko, let's  _ go— _ ” She has an arm looped around Nagato's shoulders, and Rin was wrong to think she was emotionless earlier, because there's a discomfiting mix of fear and distrust and an overarching worry etched across her face now. “I'll talk to you outside.” She has something crumpled in one hand.

Rin realizes that it's the stupid little sticky note, the one she'd half-jammed into her pocket, and—and  _ fuck _ . She spreads her fingers, holds out a hand. “Look, you're signed in, you can't just—”

“No,” Konan says, and it's resigned, a higher road, and there's an entire history in the set of her mouth. “No, not if you know them.” She presses the note back into Rin's hand, and her motions are rough. The skin of her palms is dry, almost coarse, as if she spends time with her hands in water, or running them over reams of raw paper.

“Them—I don't, though, I—”

Konan looks at her with something like sympathy, something like disparagement, something like distrust. “You shouldn't want to.”

And then they're gone, swinging out into the hall. Rin is left holding the note; she can hear Shizune saying something rather loudly, can make out Nagato's quiet murmur and Yahiko, loud, saying that they are  _ leaving,  _ he does not  _ care— _

Rin heaves a sigh. If she pushes through the curtain a little more aggressively than her norm, well. There isn't really anything to be said about that.

“What was that?” Shizune hisses, and she leans forward over the desk and keeps her voice low; when she gestures at the glass doors, her movements are tight, controlled. “What the fuck was that?”

“I don't know.” Rin slaps the clipboard onto the top of the desk with more force than necessary and presses her fingertips into her eye sockets. She can smell the sanitizer on her own hands. “I really don't know.” Inhale, exhale. You cannot help people who do not want help. “Save his file, though. Please.”

Shizune presses her lips together; when the minute lines appear between her brows, the expression is uncharacteristically harsh. It doesn't sit properly on her face.. “There's no contact information.”

“Save it anyway.” Rin tucks a loose piece of hair behind her ear, and it catches and pulls on an earring. “Just in case.” She picks up the next patient file and the coffee, and ducks into the bathroom on the way to 3C to dump it into the chipped sink.

She doesn't throw out the note, but she doesn't call, either.

**October 19**

It's about half an hour after midnight when she gets paged up to trauma response, and they're asking for extra supplies, extra hands, maybe an extra defib, extra hands, extra hands. She rolls the defib off the elevator and drops it, because there are too many people, too many hands, and it's now quarter to one and she needs to leave, because with too many people there are too many mistakes. She hopes the poor fucker makes it.

The steel of the stairwell's battered metal railing is soothing as she makes her way back down. She briefly considers calling, maybe when she gets off her shift, but it'll be six thirty in the morning then, and what sane person would even be awake?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do I have nineties spin-offs for almost everyone? yes. do I love the orphans, and will they get their own if I ever get around to finishing it? also yes. do I love them a lot? big, big yes. 
> 
> I just really love a lot of intersecting storylines that influence one another. will I ever finish anything? maybe.


	3. november 15-january 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do I have my life together? absolutely not.

**November 15**

“We're floating you today,” Shizune says, and she gives Rin an apologetic look. “They need help upstairs, general trauma.”

Rin blinks, hands frozen behind her head as she tries to claw her hair back into a stubby excuse for a ponytail. “You've gotta be kidding me.”

Shizune raises an eyebrow. “More to medicine than the shit that happens down here, you know?” She leans down to rifle through her elaborate set of filing cubbies, yanks out a file about half as thick as her thumb. “Tsunade said you're probably ready.”

“It would have been great if she'd told  _ me _ that I'm ready,” Rin mutters. It's difficult to fight down the resentment, because it's right when she starts to get her bearings somewhere that she's bumped off to the next rotation. “General trauma?”

“Yeah.” Shizune taps the file against the palm of one hand. “They need a one-to-one, and fifth is packed already.”

Rin successfully stops herself from grimacing, because that would be in poor form and highly unprofessional, no matter how frustrating the entire situation is. “And there's no spare techs?” She can't see the logic, financially, in her spending her time as a one-to-one, and she honestly wonders if there isn't at least  _ one _ intern somewhere around here.

Shizune looks left, looks right, and then leans forward over the desk, motions Rin closer with one hand. “Look,” she says quietly, and there's something serious hiding in the curvature of her face, tucked away between muscles and nerves and tendons, and Rin knows the name to every single one, spent hours poring over textbooks and flipping through color-coded flashcards in order to learn them, but the end result is always so much more than a sum of its parts. “Look. It's—it's ugly. Bad. Even for trauma.”

Even when cautious, when worried, she's awfully pretty, and sometimes Rin thinks of her in the same synapse as she does of the woman with tattoos and wild black hair, the one she sees every night on the subway.

“Let me see.” Rin reaches for the manila folder with an idle curiosity, and she takes it in the same distant way that she touches a pan on the stove and expects it to be cool. “Stable?” She pages through it slowly, and there's mangled x-rays and notes from three surgeries and an impressive painkiller regimen, one that could likely take out a wooly mammoth if necessary.

“Somewhat.” Shizune leans back, swivels her seat from side to side. The desk dwarfs her, and it's altogether deceptive; Rin has seen her lift bodily an adult man easily twice her size. It's terrifying. “As much as can be expected, at this point.” She sighs. “I mean, he's kind of conscious. Not entirely lucid, but conscious.”

“That's something, at least.” Rin scans the admitting's notes, and promptly stops when she feels the granola she ate on the train rising in her throat. “Holy shit, how did he not die?”

“Persistence? Spite?” Shizune flips open her next file and scribbles an entire paragraph at lightspeed. “Tried to forcefully self-extubate last night, and needs monitoring with the pain medication.” Her gaze rises to meet Rin’s, just for a moment. “Heavy-handed with the auto-dispense, but can you blame them?”

“Oh.” Rin's always prided herself on her poker face. She once won a blackjack game against her college roommates by bluffing the entire way through, and the worst part was she only did it because she wanted to  _ lose _ before someone stole her fucking laundry out of the communal dryer again. This however, is requiring her to consciously stop herself from emoting, because all of those emotions would be highly unsuitable for a medical professional in any given clinical situation. “That's—that's definitely something.”

“Yeah.” Shizune glances up at her. “Happy birthday. We can get drinks tomorrow morning, if you want.” When she smiles, it's not entirely reassuring. “You might need one.”

Rin makes it all the way to the stairwell up to the fourth floor before she slows her pace. Each footstep echoes in the off-white space; she thinks it  _ might _ have been white initially, but years of dirt and tragedy and clattering have drawn it out of relief, have left it all behind some sort of partition. Early on, when she'd been overwhelmed or nauseated or disgusted with herself for being nauseated in the first place, she'd gone to the stairwells—they're neutral enough,  _ nothing _ enough, to be a place of composure, of maybe finding her balance.

When she sighs, the stairwell sighs back, and the sound bounces off the walls and swallows her. “Fuck.” It's even louder than the sigh, and doesn't bounce so much as boil in an enclosed space.

It's barely forty minutes into her overnight, and god, she is already  _ so _ tired. Rin allows herself approximately fifteen seconds to stand there and dread the next ten hours and twenty minutes.

General trauma intensive is cold—it is almost always cold, and it's always made her uneasy, because it is a clinical cold, a mortuary cold. She prefers living breathing people, who talk and cry and scream, because she can at least  _ help _ them if they communicate with her. This is sitting, waiting, tamping down the perpetual specter of helplessness.

Rin checks in with the nearly silent charge nurse, holds up her badge and the file with something like self-assurance; she collects the chart without looking, accepts the pen handed to her, and it's muscle memory, something so very very easy to do, because she does it every single day, dozens of times a day. “Thank you,” she says, and her voice catches a little from disuse, or maybe from being stuck in her trachea for so long.

“Don't thank me,” he says back, and she expects him to follow it up with something, but he doesn't, just waves her along. It's enough for her to want to set her jaw, say something back, and maybe the version of herself from a year ago, two years ago—maybe she would have.

Rin pages through the patient's chart fairly quickly; it's a little more detailed than the one Shizune had given her, which is odd, in and of itself. “Where's the identification?” It rubs her the wrong way, sets her on edge—she dislikes the impersonality of it all, the reduction to a set of billing codes on a sheet of paper.

The charge nurse shrugs, and there's an exhausted cast to his features, one too subtle to be calculated. “No public access info.” He glances at the double doors, and then back to Rin, as if uneasy. “Some kind of witness protection thing, maybe, because there were suits with papers maybe an hour or two after he got transferred up here.”

“Some kind of witness protection thing,” Rin repeats back, and really. Really. She'd expected them to come up with something better than that, but then again, she's seen some weird shit. “Alright. Thanks.” As she turns, she can see him in her peripheral, opening his mouth as if to tell her not to thank him again.

The silence of hospitals is something unique. There is nothing but the whirring machines and the muted buzzing of pagers and the relentless press of quietude, and when she pushes through the wide door the mechanism clicks in a way that bounces off the flat surfaces, and she's glad of it, because it suffuses the way she breathes in too quickly, the heretic sound that she makes when she feels, and it springs up despite months of working to suppress exactly that phenomenon.

It makes a fucked-up kind of sense, and for some reason it is Konan she thinks of, cold and frightening and so very beautiful, even while ripping a note out of her hand and telling her to keep back, to stay away, and it makes sense, makes sense, makes  _ so _ much sense.

He shifts a little, looks at her as best he can. “It's you.”

Rin blinks, fights off the sinking feeling in her stomach, fights off the guilt she feels at hoping he wouldn't recognize her. She flips to the next page in her chart, and the lines crawling across the leaf swim in and out of focus. “How are we doing?” She drags the cheap plastic folding chair a little closer, figures it's smart to sit where he can see her. “Pain scale?”

“Ah.” His words lisp a little as they drop, clunky and uneven in the machinated silence. “Good news.”

Rin can feel her eyebrows getting dangerously close to her hairline. “Yeah?”

“Infection is gone.”

“I'd hope so,” Rin says dryly, before she can censor herself.

“Bad news is so is that side.” Obito manages to shift his head a little, and the one eye that somehow stayed in his head is wide. “Or so I've been told.”

She can see his pupil dilation from here, and looking back to the chart to check dosage is sheer instinct. “So I've read.” It sounds like someone else speaking, and part of her wants to scream, wants to bang on the glass, wants to go back out there and tell the charge nurse that she cannot do this, that she  _ cannot _ , but why can't she, really, because the only interaction she's ever had with the poor fucker was some illicit sutures and passed-off antibiotics? “Pain scale?”

Obito clears his throat. “Gonna show me the little paper with the faces and have me point?”

“Just a number is fine, actually.” Rin notes that they've switched to external oxygen, a nasal cannula instead of intubation. The hoarseness in his voice leads her to believe that Shizune wasn't exaggerating—but why would she, when patients doing things exactly like trying to remove the apparatus keeping them alive is why she's even up here in the first place?

“Hm.” Obito lays there, looks at the ceiling. “Six, seven.” He looks over at her briefly, and then away again. “Yeah, around there.” His words are loose, syllables sliding into each other, blurring together.

“Alright.” Rin notes it in his chart, gets up to begin checking vitals. She likely does a poor job of keeping the surprise out of her voice, but her mind is somewhere else entirely. “You'll be all right for another hour or two?”

He snorts, as if he'd like to laugh at the sentiment.

Rin raises her eyebrows, and thankfully she's staring at the heart monitor's display screen, at her own vague outline reflected over blood oxygen statistics and average beats per minute. “Nausea? Lightheadedness?” She asks the question without looking up, focuses on fitting blood pressure into the tiny quadrant allotted on her clipboard.

“Nah.”

When she turns around again, he's back to staring at the ceiling.

It's so, so easy to slip into the lives of other people, to be swallowed up entirely by circumstance. Rin, however, is a professional, and does her job

**January 3**

The one-to-one becomes a weekly occurrence, because their usual overnight does need a day off. The weekly occurrences become voluntary visits, although 'visit' is possibly a loose way of defining what she does.

It's maybe a month or two or three after her initial assignment, and she pounds up the stairwell and through the double doors without a second thought, because if she hurries she can still make the 7:02 back home.

The altogether unfriendly charge nurse stares at her askance. “What are you doing here?”

“Just, you know.” Rin tries to gesture, and she hadn't really thought through the wisdom of trying to do so with a travel mug full of coffee in one hand and a tote bag in the other. “Stopping by.”

“Oh.” There's something unpleasant in the man's voice. While she's always tried to have some sort of respect for other medical professionals, it's become extremely hard not to actively dislike him. And by dislike, of course, she means 'really fucking hate'. “I see.”

“He hasn't gotten a single visitor, Kabuto,” Rin says, and she keeps her words low, because other staff are starting to trickle in, and the bustle of prep for rounds has started. “It's been months.”

Kabuto sighs, as if he's become some long-suffering martyr when she wasn't looking. “They discharged him.”

“Oh.” Rin stiffens her shoulders, draws some sort of manufactured surety into her posture. “Alright, then.” She can  _ feel _ the flush rising, crawling up her neck like some sort of traitorous rash. She spins on her heel and turns to walk away. “Thanks, Kabuto.” She darts back through the doors.

“He's a—”

The weighted door clangs shut behind her, and Rin wonders how fast it's possible to walk down a hallway without spilling coffee.

Rin has to kick her apartment door to get it open, and she collapses on her bed and sleeps until noon. When she finally manages to pry her face from the worn coverlet, it feels as if her entire body is too dry, as if all the moisture has been wrung out of it. 

She stumbles barefoot to the tiny kitchen sink, drinks water directly from the faucet and idly wonders if whatever’s in there will get her her own comic book feature, or at least a fun talk with radiology. It’s almost eerily quiet, outside of the distant horns and clatter, outside of the tinny patter of the weak water stream hitting the basin of the sink and trickling down the drain. 

There’s another particularly loud horn from outside, and distant yelling--more or less average, for  _ any _ borough, but there’s something empty about it, or maybe it’s something about the unsurety, or maybe it’s the stillness that presses down on the ugly carpet and the chipped paint of the walls. Maybe she’s just overtired. 

It’s not of her own accord, but she finds herself rifling through the backpack she uses for her commute, and she finds the post-it note from months ago crumpled into a barely recognizable matchstick of a thing at the very bottom. 

She calls, listens to the dial tone. It sounds like a heart monitor, she thinks, and honestly, she must be far more sleep deprived than she realizes, because when it goes to voicemail she hangs up. 

The click of the receiver is loud, but the blood rushing in her ears is louder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't we all just hate kabuto? I know I sure do.


	4. february 20-april 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> keep in mind that I would never write anything fluff, ok? 
> 
> just. just keep that in mind.

**February 20**

“I didn’t think you’d ever actually call, you know?” Obito seems rather averse to actually eating his bagel, and more inclined to rip off piece after piece and toss them into the water. His breath hangs in the air after he speaks, like some sort of echo, or maybe just underlying implication. 

It’s early, ridiculously early--barely half past seven, and so far the only people they’ve seen have been one or two bundled-up joggers and an elderly couple that caused Rin genuine concern, considering the current temperature. 

Rin shivers a little, wraps her hands a little tighter around her paper cup of coffee. “Well. I didn’t--” She shrugs, although it’s likely barely visible under her absolute abomination of a ski jacket. Vaguely, she wonders when the last time she actually _ washed _ the damn thing, and immediately cuts off that train of thought. “I wasn’t really sure what to make of all of that.” 

Obito laughs, and it’s quiet, not entirely pleasant. “Which part?” His speech has gotten better over the last several months; it had been just another thing to re-learn, because when half the muscles in your face are severed, well. It’s understandable, is what she’s saying. 

“Any of it, really.” Rin can hear the nervousness in her own voice, the frustration. “I mean, first you show up with an untreated _ stab wound-- _”

“Technically it _ was _ treated, I mean, I cleaned it and everything.” Obito squints at the river and lobs another bagel projectile at the cluster of geese. “And my cousin sewed it up.” One of them honks indignantly, as if in protest. “Kind of.” 

“Kind of?” Rin can hear her own indignance, and it sounds foreign, like dialogue out of a movie, like some kind of fucked up romantic comedy. “You thought that god knows _ how _old antibiotics for your strep throat were going to--”

“Hey, I mean. I lived, right?” Obito coughs, leans forward a little onto the stone of the bridge railing. “Here I am.” He tosses the other half of his bagel into the water in one go; the resulting splash is fairly impressive for a breakfast pastry, and the geese skitter away. “Living.” There’s a bitterness just under the surface, creeping at the edges of his tone.

Rin narrows her eyes, alternates between sidelong glances and watching steam swirl up out of the perforations in the lid of her cup. It’s all very mesmerizing, although she’s been awake for going on twenty hours now, and maybe that just makes _ everything _ mesmerizing. “Talented of you.” The words slip out of her mouth, and the regret follows just as quickly. “I mean, more like--”

“Oh, you think I’m talented?” This gets a real laugh, and he turns to look at her for the first time; he’s picky about where he stands, tries to keep her on his ‘good side’, as he puts it, as if she hasn’t already seen everything. 

It’s understandable, though--to be expected, even. Rin catches herself making clinical analyses more often than not, and it’s a perpetual battle against instinct. “Hey, now,” she says slowly, and this is so very very hard and so very very easy, and honestly, she’s always loved charming trainwrecks. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” 

When he smiles, it’s lopsided. It will always be lopsided now. “It’s mostly thanks to this really great doctor--” 

“Resident,” Rin corrects, before she can stop herself. “Not a full-fledged doctor, not yet.” 

“As I was _ saying _.” The words themselves are tempered by whatever it is that hangs on to his expression, something uncharacteristically soft. “There’s this really great resident, you might know her--”

“Oh my god, really?” Fighting off the urge to roll her eyes is more difficult than it should be. “Really.” It might be the sleep deprivation, or the giddiness that immediately follows coming off a twelve hour shift, but she smiles in spite of herself. 

Obito picks at a chip in the concrete of the bridge’s railing, avoids looking at her, keeps his bad arm tucked at his side. “You know, brown hair.” He looks over at her briefly, exaggerates his analysis. “About your height too, really pretty, nice eyes, nice hands--”

“Are you kidding me?” She can’t help but laugh, can’t help but look at him, can’t help but wonder. “This is the least smooth thing I’ve ever witnessed.” 

He holds up a hand, shrugs. “I mean, you saw my medical records and all that. A lot of shit hit me in the head.” 

“I heard a thing or two about that, yeah.” Rin looks at him sidelong, finds herself thinking that she’s in over her head. For want of anything better to do with her hands, she takes a careful sip of her coffee, shivers in her scrubs and ski jacket. 

“Yeah,” Obito echoes, and it’s as if he looks at her and looks past her all at once.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re okay.” Her nose is running from the cold, and she scrubs at it with the sleeve of her jacket. The fucking thing has to get washed anyway, she thinks. 

His expression is caught somewhere between confusion and and something like hurt, or maybe it’s just that no one has told him yet. “Thanks,” he says slowly, and it’s tinged with caution, frayed at the edges. “That was cute, by the way.” 

“Shut up, go back to feeding the ducks.” 

“They’re _ geese _, Rin.” 

**April 29**

It’s been a game of boundaries, of avoiding straying too far out of comfortable territory. There’s the television, of course, but lately Rin hasn’t been able to find the motivation to suggest a single thing to watch. It’s her only night off this week, and if she wants to spend it staring at a blank television screen and avoiding the concept of emotions in general, well. That’s her prerogative, isn’t it? 

“What are you thinking about?” Obito is looking at her, quizzical, chewing on the remains of a pizza crust. “You look…” He waves the half-eaten crust in a small arc, as if it’s narrating his thought pattern. “Out of it.” 

“Just tired, you know?” Rin eyes her half-eaten slice of pizza; clearly, her fourth piece was a mistake. “Long day.” 

Obito snorts. “You work too much.” 

“Comes with the territory.” She bites into her pizza, chews mechanically. “It’ll be worth it someday.” She swallows, thinks for a moment. “I mean, it’s  _ already _ worth it. I don’t want to make it seem like it isn’t worth it.”

“Look,” Obito says, and there’s something alarmingly frank about his tone. “I just worry, is all. Do you even, like, sleep?” 

Rin laughs, and it occurs to her that she’s got a mouthful of pizza, but that doesn’t particularly matter at the moment. “Sometimes.” She chews, swallows, sets the remainder of her slice down in the open box. “You know, schedule permitting.” 

Obito shakes his head. “You’re something else.” 

“I have to ask,” Rin says slowly, and it might be how overtired she is and it might also be the glass of box wine she had earlier and it might also just be her own genuine curiosity, and in all honesty, it’s the latter that frightens her the most. 

“Yeah?” It’s a drastic contrast, the way he’s so comfortable with her now; he looks her in the eye, doesn’t try to hide nearly as often. “What’s up?” 

“What happened?” Oh, Rin is definitely blaming the glass-- _ glasses _ , really--of wine, because this is exactly the kind of shit she hates doing. “How did you end up--”

“No,” Obito says, and it’s sharp and uncharacteristic of the version of him that she is familiar with--it is altogether alien, some stranger inhabiting her friend’s body. “No. I’m not gonna get into that, because it’s over.” He swallows, looks down. It is very easy to become aware of how they are shoulder to shoulder, sitting on his couch--shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, elbow to elbow. They match in all the places that matter. 

“How am I supposed to do this, then?” Rin asks, and maybe her tone comes out a little more sharply than usual, but she feels that she’s entitled to it, because she still sees that tattoo in her dreams, still allows her mind to create theoretical scenarios of what might have happened. “Am I supposed to let you deal with this on your own?” 

“Yes.” Obito’s tone is sharp, the jury’s final verdict. “I’m not involved in that any more, and you don’t need to know.” 

“Who are you to decide what I don’t need to know?” Rin wants to get her coat and walk out, wants to slap him, wants to kiss him--potentially in the same breath, but two might do. “Maybe people caring is a foreign concept to you, but--” She stares straight ahead at the blank television screen, ignores the heat threatening to suffuse her face. “I do, okay?” 

“God,” Obito says quietly, and when she turns he’s sitting there looking at her in a way that peels bits of the both of them away. The scar tissue tugs one corner of his lip down somewhat. A lure. “God.” 

Rin says nothing, and she sits there, because what else is there to do? Continually weighing her conflicting feelings is exhausting, and she has enough exhaustion in her life as is, so she sets her jaw and stares right back.

“Rin,” Obito says, and his voice is cast low--something earnest, something urgent. “Rin, they think I’m out of the picture. I can’t.” The way he says ‘out of the picture’ has her thinking it means ‘dead’, and the most prominent thing about it is that she thinks she’s right.

“You let them think that?” She looks over at him, and he’s very close, maybe half a foot away from her. “What about your cousin, the one that you said--”

“I couldn’t.” Obito looks down, as if there  _ is _ some kind of shame in this. “Couldn’t. He’ll be fine, he has some friends.” He picks at the thread hanging off the cuff of one sleeve, and it sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself. “Has half a brain, at least. Fine.” 

“They’re your family.” Rin tries to keep the animosity out of her tone. 

“I don’t know what you’re imagining it’s like, but it’s no Sunday dinner bullshit, okay?” Obito kicks a foot onto the coffee table, props his legs up, alternates between avoiding her gaze and looking at her with something like longing. 

She prides herself on the fact that she is polite enough to pretend not to notice. “I’m a doctor, not a therapist,” Rin says, and it’s under her breath, just loud enough to be heard. Meant to be heard, even.

Obito laughs, and the discomfort dissipates, as if it had never existed in the first place. It’s a dangerous ability, something to be careful of, she tells herself. “I thought you were a resident.” 

Rin shrugs, rolls her shoulders; they’ve been sitting like this for at least an hour and a half now, and she isn’t used to so much stillness. “You’re being pedantic.” 

The quiet that follows isn’t so much a silence as it is a comfortable interlude. They watch the black television screen and listen to the people outside, to the vibrations of the building, to the clanging of the pipes when the heat kicks on. It’s easy, something that feels safe. Rin tries to remind herself that she cannot fix people, but days like this make that seem like an unnecessary conviction to have in the first place. 

“Rin,” Obito says, finally, and he’s looking at her with something like unsurety, head tilted back against the couch. “I’m done with them, okay? Done with all that.” 

She swallows, feels something catch in her throat. “Okay.” Her voice sounds confident to her own ears, sounds like the voice of someone sure of themselves, sure of what it is they want. “Okay.” Rin shifts a little, turns to face him; they are so very close, such very good friends. She puts a hand on his shoulder, carefully, because she knows better than anyone that it’s held together with metal and ceramic components, rods and screws and a prayer. “Is that what you want?” 

The light slants across them in a series of parallel lines; the streetlight outside buzzes, flickers once or twice before switching on. The slatted blinds over the window dessicate the illumination it gives off. It’s surreal: not quite lucidity, but something else entirely. 

“Not entirely.” His words hang in the stillness, and it’s an entire minute of silence before he speaks again. “I want to be a better person.” Obito clears his throat and looks away for a minute, and it’s as if he’s gathering reasons or resolve or some sort of motivation. “Need to be, more like.” 

Rin presses her lips together, tries to reconcile the person she met months ago, before all of this--tries to reconcile him with the man in front of her. It’s arduous, exhausting. “Hey, it’s okay,” she murmurs, and it isn’t really okay at all, but there’s not much else to be said. At the end of the day they know so little about one another, she thinks, but her hands have always worked on autopilot, have been conditioned to comfort, to soothe. “It’s okay.” 

He leans into her touch, rests his face in her hand. “You deserve better.” When he reaches out to tuck her hair behind one ear, his fingers tremble a little. 

The skin beneath his remaining eye is wet, Rin notes, with a clinical sort of detachment. “I think that’s a bit of a blanket statement.” They are close, so close, foreheads a hand’s breadth apart. 

“Is it?” When Obito laughs this time, it’s soft, but soft in the same way the marshland Brooklyn is built on is soft, soaking mud and ragweed giving way beneath her feet. “I wouldn’t know.” His fingertips trace the outline of her ear, an eyebrow, the line of her jaw. 

Rin opens her mouth and she’s about to say something, about to offer some sort of insight, but there’s something in her that can’t be bothered. She leans forward instead, closes the scant distance between them with confidence she doesn’t really have. When she kisses him, she can feel the raised whorls of scar tissue, the hidden implications, the door slamming behind her. 

It’s as if she’s flipped some sort of switch, because when he responds it doesn’t feel like romance, it feels like rescue breathing. Rin vaguely recalls from her lifeguard training seven, eight years ago that you can’t get too close to someone drowning, because they’ll try to pull you down with them. Her hands move to the nape of his neck, to his hair, to his shoulders. 

When he pulls away, his breathing is warm on her neck, coming in harsh bursts. “Did you mean that?” he asks, and it’s tinged with something like longing, something like loss, something like a wrecked desperation. 

Rin wonders how long it has been since anyone at all has touched him, aside from doctors, from medical professionals, aside from her. “Yeah.” She works her fingers into his hair, watches him close his eye, exhale with an irascible slowness. “Yeah, I did.” 

“Thank god,” he breathes, and when he kisses her again it’s a little messier, with teeth and intent and some kind of consumptive fervor, as if he still isn’t quite sure it’s real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying out some different stuff. let me know what you think. 
> 
> also, they're really bad for each other. just you wait, guys.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, feel free to get in touch, either here or on [tumblr](https://ame-trio.tumblr.com/).


End file.
